Three seasons in, NBC’s This Is Us continues to be the most notable primetime drama on television. Throughout its short tenure, it’s earned six Golden Globe nominations (one win) and 18 Emmy nominations (three wins). Its current Rotten Tomatoes score sits at a healthy 87 per cent, and it was the sixth most-watched show of the year in 2017, according to Nielsen, following television juggernauts The Big Bang Theory, The Good Doctor and NCIS.

In the era of Peak TV, where Netflix and HBO reign supreme, the critical and commercial success of This Is Us marks a particularly impressive achievement.

Hoping to achieve the same results, This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman essentially compressed the meaty main themes of his series — life, death, love, family — into Life Itself, a 120-minute film (though with no less plot). Only, it wasn’t quite received the same way. Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September to a blistering 11 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Life Itself has gone on to earn a mere $3.7-million box office in its first two weeks. Critics have dubbed it “the worst movie of the year,” “an unholy combination of Rashomon and Babel,” “excruciatingly contrived and ill-conceived,” “emotionally sadistic” and “grief porn.”

Moore, Ventimiglia.NBC

In a recent IndieWire interview, Fogelman addressed the critical scolding: “I think that the people with the widest reach are getting increasingly cynical and vitriolic and I think there are a couple of genres and a couple of ideas that they (attack, which) doesn’t speak to not just a mainstream audience, but also a sophisticated audience. … There’s a disconnect between something that is happening (with) our primarily white male critics who don’t like anything that has any emotion.” He then blasted them for labelling his work “emotionally manipulative” every time they see storylines where his characters “go through anything.”

For the clever pop-culture critic, this might prompt a question: why would something that’s praised on television be denigrated when it makes its way to the cinema? But for the galaxy-brained pop-culture critic, a more pressing query comes to mind: why haven’t we been harder on This Is Us, when it does all the things for which Life Itself stands accused?

For both series and film, narratives that could hold some semblance of emotional weight — like Life Itself‘s exploration of mental health or This Is Us‘s interracial family politics — become trivial under the weight of emotional theatrics. Unfortunately for Fogelman, the critical response to his movie has revealed the depths to which This Is Us has managed to deceive its audience, by serving basic emotional melodrama under the guise of sophistication. That’s a smart play when it comes to ratings, but not so much when it comes to substance.

Watson, Brown.Ron Batzdorff/NBC

In the initial season of This Is Us, the impending death of the family patriarch, Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia), felt like a spectre that didn’t loom so much as it was held above by a jerry-rigged harness controlled by a crew member to up the emotional ante. When it finally made its crash-landing mid-way through the second season of the series, NBC chose to bill the moment as a “television event,” securing the highly sought-after post-Super Bowl time slot for the episode, and drawing nearly 27-million viewers in the process.

Unlike its patricidal predecessors Six Feet Under, Brothers & Sisters and Parenthood, This Is Us had no intention of subtly weaving death into its narrative. It reduced a potentially poignant moment into a plot device, pivoting its production toward a direction that would make most soap operas shudder. From the pilot episode, it was clear that the series shared more in common with an M. Night Shyamalan movie than anything resembling prestige television, concluding in a cliffhanger that revealed Jack and wife Rebecca (Mandy Moore) in Timeline A were parents to the adults in Timeline B.

There have been many twists since, including fooling viewers into believing Jack survives a house fire (due to a faulty crock-pot, natch) in Season 2, only to have the character succumb to an unrelated heart attack. Viewers were also treated to Jack’s adoptive son Randall (Sterling K. Brown) meeting his biological father William, who not only turned out to be suffering from stage-four cancer, but admitted to abandoning his son just before tragically dying (but not before coming out as being bisexual). We also learned that Jack had a secret brother, that Rebecca knew William wanted to reunite with Randall (but never told him) and that, after Jack’s death, she gets the hots for his best friend.

These ridiculous story arcs seem custom built for its cast to ham up, from self-righteous, meandering speeches by Randall to talk of being a good father, a good man and a good husband from Jack (not to mention the pitiful levels of martyrdom embraced by Rebecca). No episode lacks for earnestness, but to the critical viewer, the writing comes across as cheap, reeking of emotional manipulation and Emmy bait. Like over-salted french fries that dry out your mouth yet beg your brain to buy more, Fogelman injects a heavy dose of addictive melodrama into his series – and his film.

Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde in Life Itself.VVS Films

Jared Feldman, the CEO of Canvs, an emotional measurement and analytics company that advises NBCUniversal, recently told Forbes, “Emotional connections are critical to a show’s success. We found that Season 2 of This is Us received 3.6 times more ‘cried’ reactions (on social media) than any other broadcast TV dramas during the same time period. By tapping into emotions such as sadness, creators are building deeper relationships with audiences that translate into increased viewership. … In TV dramas, for every 1 per cent increase in emotional reactions conveying ‘hate,’ there is a 0.7 per cent increase in viewership. Tapping into emotions such as ‘hate,’ ‘sadness’ and ‘beautiful’ is proven to drive results for networks and creators.”

In other words, television can be a paint-by-numbers game, and it’s one Fogelman loves to play. At least his ethos is clear: he wants us to relate to his characters and commiserate on the meaning of love and life, but also feel for them like we’ve never felt for anything before, our vision clouded with tears. “Look at this individual,” he says. Then, after conspiring to bury the individual in emotional quicksand and the most feared circumstances imaginable, he asks his audience if we feel pity for the character. When we, as tortured human beings ourselves, answer affirmatively, that we do indeed possess empathy, Fogelman says “ta-da,” like a magician at the completion of his brilliantly arranged trick.

It’s less a sleight of hand, though, and more a slap in the face of the great melodramas before it, like the aforementioned Six Feet Under, which proved two decades ago that the death of the father can be inspiration enough for five years of rich and evenly paced storytelling. For this series, death was the beginning and the end, not a random occurrence. Nuanced montages and monologues existed, but they were done sparingly. Through its dedication to story, it earned its emotional weight.

Which is all the more reason to consider This Is Us and its ilk to be the greatest of small-screen deceptions; Fogelman is playing to the lowest common denominator, those viewers who prefer the kind of procedural crime show or soap that goes down fast and easy, and requires no thinking because they’re beaten over the head at every turn, and to whom good acting is whoever talks the loudest and great storytelling is whatever makes us cry the most.

If that’s what Fogelman wants, let’s call it for what it truly is: cheap.